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  THE SANTA CLAUS MAN

  The Rise and Fall of a Jazz Age Con Man and the Invention of Christmas in New York

  ALEX PALMER

  Guilford, Connecticut

  To Mom for her reading. To Dad for his storytelling.

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 2016 by Alex Palmer

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Palmer, Alex.

  The Santa Claus man : the rise and fall of a Jazz Age con man and the invention of Christmas in New York / Alex Palmer.

  pages cm

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4930-0844-5 (hardcover) —ISBN 978-1-4930-1890-1 (e-book) 1. Gluck, John Duval, 1878-1951. 2. Santa Claus Association, Inc. (New York, N.Y.)—History. 3. Santa Claus—New York (State)—New York. 4. Christmas—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 5. United States. Post Office Department—History—20th century. 6. Charities—New York (State)—New York—History—20th century. 7. Swindlers and swindling—New York (State)—New York—Biography. 8. New York (N.Y.)—Social life and customs—20th century. 9. New York (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title. II. Title: Rise and fall of a Jazz Age con man and the invention of Christmas in New York.

  GT4986.N7P35 2015

  394.2663097471—dc23

  2015011994

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

  Contents

  Author’s Note

  Prologue: An Arrest in Coney Island

  Part I

  1. The Adventurers’ Club

  2. Appointed Rounds

  3. To All a Good Night

  4. The Most Photographed Man in the World

  5. “Enemy, Death, and a Christmas Tree”

  6. Cathedrals of Commerce

  7. Child Wonderland

  Part II

  8. Doors to Deception

  9. Naughty List

  10. German Intrigue

  11. Poor Boy Gets Nothing

  Part III

  12. “Santa Claus as a Business Man and Advertiser”

  13. Order Out of Chaos

  14. Spectacle on 34th Street

  15. Dead Letters

  Epilogue: Operation Santa Claus

  Acknowledgments

  Appendix: Timeline of Santa Claus in New York City

  Endnotes

  Bibliography

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I first heard about John Duval Gluck on Christmas Eve. As my family sat around the Christmas tree after opening gifts, my uncle Dan mentioned a great-granduncle of mine who had been New York’s Santa Claus. My brothers and I peppered him with questions, and he told us what he knew. He was fuzzy on the details but dug up a few photos and an old Seagram’s V.O. holiday print ad that featured Gluck as a man who’d “helped save Christmas” once upon a time. How had I never heard of this guy? A quick Google search pulled up little. But my curiosity was piqued—I wanted to know more about this long-lost relative of mine. It turned out there was much more.

  With the few leads from Uncle Dan, I scoured newspaper archives, the New York Public Library, and Ancestry.com. I found that Gluck, in fact, had been the toast of New York a century before—a regular presence in the newspapers, a widely quoted expert on philanthropy, and a man friendly with many of the era’s biggest stars and politicians. It came thanks to his founding of the Santa Claus Association, which for fifteen years answered every letter a New York City kid sent to St. Nick. Without Gluck and his group, these hopeful missives would be sent to the Dead Letter Office and destroyed. He made Santa real for thousands of New Yorkers.

  Under this glowing tale, however, a more illicit story line swirled—suspicions of thievery, blackmail, and espionage; an arrest; and eventual exposure as a huckster. Who was the real John Gluck?

  My search to uncover his true story took me to Florida, Texas, Washington, DC, and the far corners of Gotham. I connected with experts on Christmas, the US Postal Service, and New York City. I met with relatives I hadn’t known existed. Frances, a widow of Gluck’s nephew, recalled John fondly; after some digging, she found several storage boxes full of his papers. She sent a fifty-five-pound trove of John’s personal correspondences, official Santa Claus Association documents, and original Santa letters that served as the backbone of the story you are about to read. Among the papers was a letter from Muriel, the daughter of another of John’s brothers. Muriel proved a wonderful resource on John’s personality and checkered history, and she remembered her uncle warmly, if also as a bit peculiar.

  Through their invaluable input, loads of research, and luck, the rest of the pieces—a riveting Bureau of Investigation (the precursor to the FBI) report on Gluck’s schemes, a Supreme Court case against the Boy Scouts of America, and lots of Santa letters—fell into place. They revealed a man who yearned for escape from a mundane life but who lost his bearings once he broke free. He was a fitting man for his time—from World War I to the Great Depression—when civic engagement and optimism were at a high point and could be easily exploited by a man with a touching cause and a good story. This was when Christmas became the garish, commercial, spectacular holiday we celebrate today, with Gluck himself playing a key role in its transformation. But it was also a time when the whole party was about to come to a crashing end.

  This may be a story about Santa Claus, but all of it is true. Anything in quotes comes verbatim from the original letter, testimony, or report. In some cases I have adjusted the formatting for consistency, but I have left any misspellings or grammatical quirks intact. In a few cases I have used italics to indicate exchanges that took place but where the exact wording was not documented. Where firsthand accounts could not be found, I have noted what combination of sources I drew on in order to render the scene. Telling the true story of a fabulist presents challenges, but I verified Gluck’s claims with additional sources whenever possible.

  I like to think Gluck embodies the myth-making spirit of America—combining ambition, charm, and a healthy share of bull, when it suited him. He wanted not just a good life but greatness, and his story can be a cautionary tale or an inspiration, depending how you look at it.

  Alex Palmer

  Brooklyn, New York

  February 2015

  Alas! how dreary would be the world if there were no Santa Claus. It would be as dreary as if there were no Virginias. There would be no childlike faith then, no poetry, no romance to make tolerable this existence.

  —FRANCIS P. CHURCH, NEW YORK SUN , 1897

  PROLOGUE An Arrest in Coney Island

  How quickly fortunes reversed.

  At 9:30 p.m. on the cool evening of September 9, 1913, John Duval Gluck Jr., dressed in his best suit and bowler, his mustache carefully groomed, basked in the excitement of a stadium full of his fellow New Yorkers. A light breeze carried the scent of salt water and stale food over the hundreds of onlookers packed into their seats. They whooped at what they saw before them: In the flesh, ambling around the arena, was something they had only heard about in stories and seen in picture books.

  But just moments after this marvelous spectacle appeared, delighting and thrilling the audience, it all came crashing down. By 10:30 p.m., Gluck sa
t handcuffed and humiliated in the Coney Island Police Station.

  It was New York City’s first bullfight and the headline event of Coney Island Mardi Gras week. George Tilyou, creator of the beloved Steeplechase Park, took a chance and hired the untested Gluck to publicize it. Though a novice publicity man, the thirty-five-year-old Gluck proved adept at sparking interest. By taking out newspaper ads alongside those for Broadway shows, promising “three ferocious bulls each performance,” and talking up the showdown to his press contacts, Gluck elevated the bullfight into one of the most talked-about draws of the festival. Running two times each day, almost all of the tickets had been sold by the time the bacchanal began. Although it remained true to the spirit of the more familiar Louisiana festival, Coney Island’s Mardi Gras was held not before Lent but after Labor Day, marking the end of summer days spent lying on the beach and eating hot dogs on Surf Avenue.

  Gluck hoped this new gig might give him a fresh start. He’d followed his father into the family business at age twenty-four and dedicated himself to customs work, as vice president and then president of the customs brokerage firm John D. Gluck & Son. But a decade on, he yearned for escape. He’d spent his entire adult life immersed in the nuances of importing and exporting, excise tax and tariffs. Now he wanted his hours to go to something more meaningful. At such an exhilarating time, it seemed a shame to just watch the thrills of New York City from the outside, like the poor children he often saw on the sidewalk, faces pressed against the windows of Gotham’s proliferating shops, lobster palaces, and hotel lobbies. Gluck wanted inside.

  He possessed a natural gift for storytelling and had accumulated plenty of business associates from his brokerage work, so he decided to try his hand at publicity. His well-connected friend, the restaurateur Paul Henkel, connected Gluck with the Mardi Gras opportunity. Henkel sold tickets to the event from his newly opened steakhouse, helping bring in business as he supported his friend’s efforts to move into a new line of work.

  But now the day had finally arrived. Gluck joined the delighted crowd as New York’s eleventh annual Mardi Gras launched in the large ballroom of Luna Park with the crowning of the festival’s king and queen—tubby silent-film star John Bunny and actress Lillian Walker. They led a great parade atop their royal float, covered in garlands and incandescent bulbs, marching from Ocean Parkway and Neptune Avenue all the way to West Twenty-Second Street. Behind them traveled floats representing farflung countries while costumed mummers and brass bands rounded out the procession. Bringing in the rear was the Coney Island float—a giant electric-lighted lobster ridden by a bevy of young beauties. Gluck could barely make out the floats through the blizzard of confetti and paper streamers.

  For Gluck and the other spectators, the dancing crowds and colors seemed like a kaleidoscopic dream. Among the audience that evening, Italian-born painter Joseph Stella described the “hectic mood the surging crowd and the revolving machines generating for the first time, not anguish and pain, but violent, dangerous pleasures.” The swirling lights and colossal rides he saw that night inspired his first masterpiece—the hallucinogenic oil painting Battle of Lights, Coney Island, Mardi Gras. Coney was a place where New Yorkers could forget everyday obligations and social codes—cuddling in the Barrel of Love and laughing as clowns zapped men with electric stingers and hidden air jets blew up girls’ skirts in the Blowhole Theater. One of the most popular attractions was a booth with fake china dishes that customers paid to destroy. “If you can’t break up your own home, break up ours!” read the sign. And at Mardi Gras, Coney Island got wilder than usual.

  The crowd was especially lively thanks to acting mayor Adolph Kline’s decision to provide twenty-five all-night licenses to local cafes and hotels, supplying drinks to all who wanted them, as late, or early, as they liked. It fueled the horde, which made its way past Steeplechase’s Ferris wheel and mechanical racecourse toward the large makeshift arena Tilyou had installed for the headline event. The shop girls, newsboys, and other revelers, who had each paid fifty cents to as much as five dollars per ticket, filled the seats overlooking an emptied swim tank, its water replaced by a foot of sand. Gluck had arrived early to ensure all the performers were ready and to provide a few interviews to reporters. Was there any truth to the rumors the bullfight might be cancelled? What about the safety of the bull? they asked. Absolutely no truth to it, Gluck assured them. And there is no reason to worry about the safety of the bull—or the matador, for that matter. As he had explained many times already, this would be a “bloodless bullfight”—a demonstration, not a violent confrontation. He could barely hide his annoyance and urged the reporters to stop speaking with the meddling Humane Society folks, who had been ginning up protests about the event the past week. Just watch the show for yourself, he urged. As the crowd of seven hundred settled, Gluck found a place on the sideline with a view of the action. He lit a cigarette to dissipate some of his nervous excitement as his watch struck 9:30. He would show these skeptics.

  A thick, muscular man strolled into the arena, wearing colorful traje de luces, complete with wide-brimmed hat, short jacket, and snug tights. The clothing, aided by the lightness of his smooth movements, gave him a deceptively slender appearance. The crowd knew this man: famed Spanish matador Enrique Robles, whom Gluck had trumpeted as a daredevil, brindled with scars, who had nearly lost an eye during a recent scrap with a bull. Spectators whispered to one another the story of how Robles had defeated his first bull at age fifteen—how he’d sat in the audience just as they did today, but at a crucial moment jumped over the barrier, pulled from his pocket several sharp banderillas, and planted them deep in the beast’s back. The bull threw him seventeen feet, and kicked off the teenager’s death-defying career. Now Robles had brought his first show in the United States to Brooklyn, and these spectators were there to witness history.

  Several picadors on horseback galloped onto the sand following the matador, each dressed in a short velvet jacket, silk shirt, and velvet stockings with a pica lance used to test the bull’s strength and to signal Robles which side the creature favored. Over the loudspeaker, announcer Eugene Talrone described each step of the dance in excited tones, while assuring the onlookers this was only an exhibition. Robles and his retinue would not taunt, injure, or kill the bull but merely demonstrate what such a performance looked like in Spain. Gluck glanced at the reporters to ensure they jotted that last point. A pair of cowboys, ready to perform between Robles’s demonstrations, waited nearby.

  The introductions over, a side gate opened and the real star of the evening appeared: a hulking Andalusian bull, brought from Spain on the same ship as Robles. It trudged around the ring, ignoring the riotous crowd that called to it. Few in the audience had ever seen such a creature in action, and their cheers validated Gluck’s promises that this would be an event New York would not soon forget.

  Gluck drummed up a packed house, partly because bullfighting remained a divisive sport. The last high-profile show had taken place almost a decade earlier, at the 1904 World’s Fair in St. Louis. When the authorities had tried to halt the event, a mob of almost seven thousand stormed the arena, destroyed the furnishings, and burned it to the ground. A 1911 letter to the editor of the New York Times urged that the international community condemn bullfighting or “in some way lift the Spanish people to a more enlightened form of amusement.”

  At least five men in the audience shared this distaste for the sport. They bought seats not for their own entertainment but because they distrusted Gluck’s assurances that this fight would be nonviolent. Three were New York veterinarians: Edward Leary, Thomas Childs, and Philip Finn. Next to them sat Thomas Archer, a representative of the Humane Society, and Thomas Freel, superintendent of the Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals (SPCA).

  They watched hawk-eyed as Robles delicately approached the bull. The creature moved slowly and seemed hardly the furious animal the crowd expected. The matador placed a tissue streamer between the animal’s horns. No react
ion. The announcer attempted to add excitement to the proceedings, describing how fierce and dangerous the creature could get, but the somnambulant bull took little notice of the strutting matador. Sensing the dissipating energy, with a showman’s desire to give the people what they paid for, and flouting all of Gluck’s assurances and New York City law, Robles smacked the bull on the nose. Gluck’s throat tightened. The bull’s gloominess vanished. Snapping to furious attention, the animal charged. It ran at Robles, who dodged the beast. And then it kept running—straight at the crowd.

  Without slowing down, the bull slammed headlong into the wooden barricade separating it from the audience. Members of the crowd shrieked and dove from their seats, frightened he would charge again or crash through the barricade altogether.

  While many ran for their lives, the veterinarians jumped from their seats and sprinted toward the bull, which now lay on its side. Upon striking the arena wall, the creature had knocked itself unconscious. The crowd and the doctors had little to fear from the beast now. The reporters on the sidelines began gunning questions at Gluck, but he could only stare silently as Leary, Childs, and Finn examined the bull from hoof to horns and found its nose badly cut. An animal lover himself, Gluck pitied the poor bull—but more distressful at that moment was that the gore pouring from the creature’s face made Gluck’s “bloodless” claim a lie. That was not only embarrassing, it was illegal. The doctors signaled to the men from the SPCA and the Humane Society. In the past, the two organizations had traded barbs about each other’s effectiveness but set aside their differences for such a high-profile gathering. Freel and Archer worked together in arranging for the veterinarians to be on hand and—as Gluck was about to learn—in securing the involvement of several cops.

  As if in slow motion, Gluck watched as uniformed police officers consulted with the animal-rights men and then moved on Robles’s six picadors and the two cowboys, corralling and cuffing the costumed figures. Next they went after announcer Talrone and, amidst his protests and in view of the reporters he had tried so hard to impress, handcuffed Gluck himself. The papers the next day would gleefully recount the event’s meltdown and arrest of its press agent, much to Gluck’s ire. Fleet-footed Robles managed to escape. Though reports differed whether the collision with the fence or the strike from the matador caused the bull’s bloody nose, the fracas provided the police with enough to charge the event’s organizers with breaking sections 181 and 185 of the New York City penal code—baiting animals and animal cruelty, respectively. The officers frog-marched the motley band of men to the Coney Island Police Station.